The Eighth Science Fiction MEGAPACK ®. Pamela Sargent

      Embarrassed, he turned back to the passageway.

      “What did you see?” she asked from behind him. Now her voice was edged as well.

      “Nothing, ma’am. Nothing at all.”

      Back in the passageway, Maduabuchi fled toward his cabin. Several of the crew laughed from sick bay, their voices rising over the whine of the bone-knitter. Someone had gone down hard.

      Not him. Not even at the hands – or eyes – of Captain Smith.

      * * * *

      An hour later, after checking the locations of the crew again with the ship’s AI, he ventured back to the Survey Suite. Chillicothe Xiang nodded to him in the passageway, almost friendly, as she headed aft for a half-shift monitoring the power plants in Engineering.

      “Hey,” Maduabuchi said in return. She didn’t answer, didn’t even seem to notice he’d spoken. All these years, all the surgeries and nano injections and training, and somehow he was still the odd kid out on the playground.

      Being a Howard Immortal was supposed to be different. And it was, when he wasn’t around other Howard Immortals.

      The Survey Suite was empty, as advertised. Ultra-def screens wrapped the walls, along with a variety of control inputs, from classical keypads to haptics and gestural zones. Maduabuchi slipped into the observer’s seat and swept his hand to open the primary sensor routines.

      Captain Smith had left her last data run parked in the core sandbox.

      His fingers hovered over the purge, then pulled back. What had she been looking at, that had made her so interested in what he’d seen? Those eyes flashed edged and dangerous in his memory. He almost asked the ship where she was, but a question like that would be reported, drawing more attention than it was worth.

      Maduabuchi closed his eyes for a moment, screwing up his courage, and opened the data run.

      It cascaded across the screens, as well as virtual presentations in the aerosolized atmosphere of the Survey Suite. Much more than he’d seen when he was in here before – plots, scales, arrays, imaging across the EM spectrum, color-coded tabs and fields and stacks and matrices. Even his Howard-enhanced senses had trouble keeping up with the flood. Captain Smith was far older and more experienced than Maduabuchi, over half a dozen centuries to his few decades, and she had developed both the mental habits and the individualized mentarium to handle such inputs.

      On the other hand, he was a much newer model. Everyone upgraded, but the Howard Institute baseline tech evolved over generations just like everything else in human culture. Maduabuchi bent to his work, absorbing the overwhelming bandwidth of her scans of Tiede 1, and trying to sort out what it was that had been the true object of her attention.

      Something had to be hidden in plain sight here.

      * * * *

      He worked an entire half-shift without being disturbed, sifting petabytes of data, until the truth hit him. The color-coding of one spectral analysis matrix was nearly identical to the green flash he thought he’d seen on the surface of Tiede 1.

      All the data was a distraction. Her real work had been hidden in the metadata, passing for nothing more than a sorting signifier.

      Once Maduabuchi realized that, he unpacked the labeling on the spectral analysis matrix, and opened up an entirely new data environment. Green, it was all about the green.

      “I was wondering how long that would take you,” said Captain Smith from the opening hatch.

      Maduabuchi jumped in his chair, opened his mouth to make some denial, then closed it again. Her eyes didn’t look razored this time, and her voice held a tense amusement.

      He fell back on that neglected stand-by, the truth. “Interesting color you have here, ma’am.”

      “I thought so.” Smith stepped inside, cycled the lock shut, then code-locked it with a series of beeps that meant her command override was engaged. “Ship,” she said absently, “sensory blackout on this area.”

      “Acknowledged, Captain,” said the ship’s puppy-friendly voice.

      “What do you think it means, Mr. St. Macaria?”

      “Stars don’t shine green. Not to the human eye. The blackbody radiation curve just doesn’t work that way.” He added, “Ma’am.”

      “Thank you for defining the problem.” Her voice was dust-dry again.

      Maduabuchi winced. He’d given himself away, as simply as that. But clearly she already knew about the green flashes. “I don’t think that’s the problem, ma’am.”

      “Mmm?”

      “If it was, we’d all be lining up like good kids to have a look at the optically impossible brown dwarf.”

      “Fair enough. Then what is the problem, Mr. St. Macaria?”

      He drew a deep breath and chose his next words with care. Peridot Smith was old, old in way he’d never be, even with her years behind him someday. “I don’t know what the problem is, ma’am, but if it’s a problem to you, it’s a command issue. Politics. And light doesn’t have politics.”

      Much to his surprise, she laughed. “You’d be amazed. But yes. Again, well done.”

      She hadn’t said that before, but he took the compliment. “What kind of command problem, ma’am?”

      Captain Smith sucked in a long, noisy breath and eyed him speculatively. A sharp gaze, to be certain. “Someone on this ship is on their own mission. We were jiggered into coming to Tiede 1 to provide cover, and I don’t know what for.”

      “Not me!” Maduabuchi blurted.

      “I know that.”

      The dismissal in her words stung for a moment, but on the while, he realized he’d rather not be a suspect in this particular witch hunt.

      His feelings must have shown in his face, because she smiled and added, “You haven’t been around long enough to get sucked into the Howard factions. And you have a rep for being indifferent to the seductive charms of power.”

      “Uh, yes.” Maduabuchi wasn’t certain what to say to that.

      “Why do you think you’re here?” She leaned close, her breath hot on his face. “I needed someone who would reliably not be conspiring against me.”

      “A useful idiot,” he said. “But there’s only seven of us. How many could be conspiring? And over a green light?”

      “It’s Tiede 1,” Captain Smith answered. “Someone is here gathering signals. I don’t know what for. Or who. Because it could be any of the rest of the crew. Or all of them.”

      “But this is politics, not mutiny. Right…?”

      “Right.” She brushed off the concern. “We’re not getting hijacked out here. And if someone tries, I am the meanest fighter on this ship by a wide margin. I can take any three of this crew apart.”

      “Any five of us, though?” he asked softly.

      “That’s another use for you.”

      “I don’t fight.”

      “No, but you’re a Howard. You’re hard enough to kill that you can take it at my back long enough to keep me alive.”

      “Uh, thanks,” Maduabuchi said, very uncertain now.

      “You’re welcome.” Her eyes strayed to the data arrays floating across the screens and in the virtual presentations. “The question is who, what and why.”

      “Have you compared the observational data to known stellar norms?” he asked.

      “Green flashes aren’t a known stellar norm.”

      “No, but we don’t